Keep the Hopenchange: Personal incomes drop

posted at 4:10 pm on March 26, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

How bad was 2009 for Americans? Rampant unemployment got combined with huge pricing signals for higher taxes and costs for businesses in a way that had everyone squeezing pennies until Abraham Lincoln squealed. Not surprisingly, the recession and those pricing signals added up to a big negative for American income in 42 states:

Personal income in 42 states fell in 2009, the Commerce Department said Thursday.

Nevada’s 4.8% plunge was the steepest, as construction and tourism industries took a beating. Also hit hard: Wyoming, where incomes fell 3.9%. …

Nationally, personal income from wages, dividends, rent, retirement plans and government benefits declined 1.7% last year, unadjusted for inflation.

Guess where the pain was felt the least?

Incomes stayed flat in two states and rose in six and the District of Columbia.

K Street’s top 25 firms cashed in on the aggressive legislative agenda unleashed by the new president and bigger Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 to post double-digit growth of about 10 percent over the previous year.

Despite economic uncertainty and the promise by the Obama administration to clamp down on the influence industry, the majority of top lobbying firms posted higher numbers in 2009, with 11 firms showing dramatic growth.

How’s that Hope and Change working out for America, anyway? Not too well, according to RealClearPolitics columnists George Bittlingmayer, Arthur Havenner & Thomas Hazlett (via Jim Geraghty):

Counter to the predictions put forward a year ago by the Administration, when it claimed that “more than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector,” U.S. companies employed 3.9 million fewer workers in January 2010 than they did one year earlier. Public employment bucked the trend, staying constant even as governments contended with sharply reduced tax revenues. While the jobs held by those 22 million public workers helped support many families, the “stimulus” failed to trigger private sector employment growth.

In late 2009, the Congressional Budget office pegged employment gains due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (A.R.R.A.) of 2009 at 600,000 to 1.6 million, while estimating its full cost at $862 billion.

This implies a price tag, at the median estimate, of about $800,000 per job. These forecast job gains are not permanent, but temporary. The Administration’s January 2009 forecast was that the A.R.R.A. was needed to reduce the path of unemployment for five years, when the unemployment rate – if we did nothing – would decline to the level projected with the “stimulus.” Using this five-year time horizon projects annual costs of approximately $160,000 per job.

Jim calculates that to reach Obama’s Porkulus claims, we would have to have a net job creation of over 730,000 jobs per month from now until the end of the year. I guess that’s where the hope comes in handy.

Blowback

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Obama: “This is a good thing. You materialists are always wasting money on buying things you don’t want. You should be like me. Spending time with my family and listening to my speeches and contemplating how best to join one of my many freedom organizations to better help and rebuild America.”

Rampant unemployment got combined with huge pricing signals for higher taxes and costs for businesses in a way that had everyone squeezing pennies until Abraham Lincoln squealed.

Global demand getting crushed (by more than just unemployment) also has a lot to do with it. I get that you’re highlighting what Obama’s actually responsible for, as a political point, but economically the case for laying this entirely at his feet becomes slightly more difficult.

And remember, pound for pound it is regulation, or the anticipation of regulation, that causes more economic disruption than tax increases.

I’m an independent contractor and I can tell you, with my income reduction last year of 34%, the last thing I’m thinking of is hiring anyone; more like, I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth. Property taxes are increasing. Hope & change my arse.

ObaMao: “You may have heard that personal income has dropped in the last year. Let me be perfectly clear. This is by design. It’s all part of Michelle’s plan to fight obesity in children. As Joe told me just this morning, ‘This is an effing big deal!’”

As evidenced by the D.C. figure, if you take out the state and governmental employment and look at the private sector, the situation looks much worse. Is there a subset of this information which looks at the private sector alone?

You know a lot of times it’s true that the President gets too much credit and/or blame for the employment and job numbers, but my goodness this is one time where not enough blame can be put on Obama, Congress, and their communist and marxist policies.

That’s why there is no way in the world that this isn’t deliberate. Usually you can put other factors in and say that an unknown variable came into play, but the policies that these people are implementing are so blatantly destructive that they should not be given the benefit of the doubt or be let off the hook as being “incompetent.”

The Ant and the Grasshopper [Political Humor]
Aesop’s Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop’s Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education. With everything going on today by today’s liberals it is good to reflect on some adapted versions of Aesop’s Fable about “the Ant and the Grasshopper.”

OLD ADAPTED VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold. MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake. Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients.

The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood. MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote!

While the jobs held by those 22 million public workers helped support many families, the “stimulus” failed to trigger private sector employment growth

It was never supposed to. They lied that it’d ever do that. It was a stimulus of something, just the definition was far too vague to specifically define it.

Screw this, seize back the language these fools are using. They have to be challenged on every definition. They say “economic stimulus” and most would think—jobs, hiring, products, services etc etc…..but noooo, stimulating Gino the Greasy Palm and his bands of merry henchmen is what’s its doing–simply for busting patellae.

It was never supposed to. They lied that it’d ever do that. It was a stimulus of something, just the definition was far too vague to specifically define it.

Screw this, seize back the language these fools are using. They have to be challenged on every definition. They say “economic stimulus” and most would think—jobs, hiring, products, services etc etc…..but noooo, stimulating Gino the Greasy Palm and his bands of merry henchmen is what’s its doing–simply for busting patellae.

ted c on March 26, 2010 at 4:42 PM

Everything they name ends up being the exact opposite. The American “Recovery” Act is actually helping to destroy America. Then you have the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act which will cause healthcare to skyrocket and do everything EXCEPT protect patients.

Fools fell for this Fool in Chief. Now the whole country has to suffer.

Schadenfreude on March 26, 2010 at 4:44 PM

If statists think their ideas are so great, you would think they would support federalism. They could use their dominance of CA, NY, and other states, turn them into statist utopia’s, and rub it into the faces of conservatives. Furthermore, since they dominate these states politically, they would not have to worry about conservatives undoing their policies or forceing them to compromise the awesomeness of those policies.

I hope to God you people that voted for this nightmare now realize the possibility of the total destruction of our country.Today with nukes and this surrender deal to the Russians.A few days ago throwing Israel under the bus and then backing back over them.GOD save us.

Jim calculates that to reach Obama’s Porkulus claims, we would have to have a net job creation of over 730,000 jobs per month from now until the end of the year. I guess that’s where the hope comes in handy.

This is the point where Obummer would get up in a huff, leave the room, and announce he’s going to dinner.

I cannot lay the blame for wage defaltion on Obama’s doorstep. Wages have to equal prodcutivity. Unions have beeen succesfull at weighting wages at the cost of productivity for the last three generations. Wage deflation is a must. The public sector wil be hit the hardest but everyone will feel the effects.

And have you noticed that the price of gas is creeping ever upward? Wait until ObaMao and the Righteously Inflamed Dems try to punish Big Earl. The cost of everything will rise to handle the increase in passed-along prices.

The news is only going to get worse for the next couple of years.
Hence the press and lib bloggers are jumping at every chance to push the “Party of No” meme and the “Republicans are filled with violent right wingers” to keep the real news out of the news.

We need the Troll Roll Call to tell us what happened. I’m sure there has to be some reasonable explanation.

Meanwhile we lost one of the two industries in the county in 2009. The remaining one is closing this June. The independent loggers are being squeezed out by lack of timber sales by the Forest Service (the largest land owner in the county) and the economy has cratered the tourist industry. While the country is in a recession the UP has fallen into a depression.

Bad results and Oliar’s alinsky tactics are going to speed up to the point that a complicit MSM and their selective reporting won’t be able to cover up the marxism.
Many of the 52% are now noticing the genie out of the bottle. Targeting his critics, and a naked power grab are going to confirm to the til now less interested, what this regime is all about.
There’s no slowing this down before November, so anger and confusion are only going to increase.
For those that are worried that the Tea Party type activism will lose momentum, not a chance in hell.

West Virginia had the best showing with a 2.1% increase.
Bad news guys, but WV is a microcosm of what is to come. Socialism-lite. We’ve been pre-disasterized. We don’t have any booms, so nothing goes bust. Welcome to the future.

The Demoncrates will never understand the concept of money because it is not theirs. They do not have enough to pay for a program they want, they just confiscate it from U.S. via taxation. Remember, what the original Tea Party was about, well Dejavue, history is repeating itself.

Also, remember is took several years to win that battle so let U.S. just keep on fighting the good fight wining any victory no matter how small.

I wonder if they offer Starbucks and organic ingredient pizza before/after his events. That would keep them coming.

So they left off part of the story. If personal income fell
in 42 states then state and federal tax revenue fell also. How much? How many millions and billions have 42 states fallen behind in paying for what they already have in programs etc? How far has the Federal government fallen behind?